Pieces of Me

by MarshalGraves

Rating: mature
Tags: Original Character, Suicide / Self Harm, Profanity, Adventure, Violence, Princess Celestia, Human, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Death, Alternate Universe, Sad
Length: 21573

In which I proceed to shuffle off of the mortal coil, and back onto it once more, but not in a way any, myself especially, expected. Awakening in my own story, I proceed to live again, and try to find that which I have previously been denied.

Look at this mirror. It's mine. My mirror.

I broke it.

I lived. The mirror was me. I died. The mirror broke. That's supposed to be the entire story, right? Right.

So, imagine my surprise when I go from dying to being born in a new body, one I am almost as intimately familiar with as the one I was born with...well, the first time, I mean. I awaken in a world I created, in a character I created, far back when I was still a human.

Oh, did I forget to mention? Yeah, I'm not exactly 'me', anymore. The long, feline tail is sort of a dead giveaway, there.

So, I'm my own character, my heart and soul beating in the chest of a feline furry, set in my own original world. At least at first.

See, thing is, when you do something once, you kinda develop a habit for doing it again....

Published 2018-03-06 15:30:13 UTC
Last updated 2018-03-21 01:26:09 UTC

Prologue - Breaking Apart, Coming Together

Author's Note

Welcome, everyone, to my first attempt to dabble in this world.

This is an exercise brought on by some recent trauma in my personal life that brought me to the very, very edge. MLP:FIM has saved me, in this troubled time, as has FIMfiction.net. The joy and love exhibited in every chapter I have read while skulking on this site has given me quite a bit of hope and good humour, and I was inspired to start writing this little bit as a sort of toxic purge.

I am attempting to get the bad out of my system by writing something good, something that starts off dark and broken, and slowly puts itself together, piece by piece.

In effect, this story is a very large Piece of Me.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you enjoy what I have to offer.

Prologue - Breaking Apart, Coming Together

Look in the mirror.

Have you ever wondered if that mirror was more than just paint on glass? Have you ever wondered if it might be a whole world, and you were just looking into a window? Or maybe you are the image, and the mirror is showing you the real person, staring back at you, into your little pocket of unreality?

Have you ever wondered what happens if you break that mirror? Go ahead. Shatter it into a thousand tiny sparkles. Some of them are bloody, maybe, some of them are empty. Some of them cloud up. All of them are still mirrors, though, still reflecting you from a thousand different angles. Broken, jagged, sharp angles reflect you and the destruction around you. A thousand broken, jagged, sharp worlds, all of which you now inhabit.

Have you ever wondered about that?

I was human, once, a long, long time ago. I can barely remember it. Well, I can barely remember most of it. Some of it sticks pretty good in the mind, mostly the bad times. I remember how it ended especially well.

Her name was Callie. I loved her. I loved her with all my heart. I gave her my love, my loyalty, my everything. She asked me to change. I changed. She told me to put away my games, put away my cartoons, put away my fanfiction. I put away the things that made me 'me'. I was hers, mind, body, soul. I was hers for eleven months.

The day before Valentine's Day. Mardi Gras in my hometown. I got home late, early in the morning, from Lundi Gras. I was working as a rideshare driver, making money for her, and I came home a little late. She was asleep. Her phone beeped. A text message summary appeared on her screen, from someone named 'Mark', talking about how they couldn't wait to see her again. My heart started to freeze.

I resolved to talk it out with her. I got into bed, and made myself ready to sleep. She was a cuddler, and clung to me like an octopus. My heart thawed just a bit. I woke up at noon, got up and took a shower. Her mother must have called her, because I was just getting dressed when Callie came home.

It was all my fault. I was disrespectful. I was lazy. I dismissed her children. I didn't listen to her. It was all in one ear, out the other. I was always on my computer. We're through. We're done. I have to leave before eight o'clock, but my stuff can stay.

My mind was whirling. When had I disrespected anyone? How was I lazy, I was never home, always working. I spent what little time I was allowed at home teaching her son and daughter, watching cartoons with them, or being a jungle gym. I always listened to her, even when she was glued to Facebook on her phone and kept starting sentences and expecting me to know what was going on. My computer had been collecting dust for weeks at a time. Why? Why are we through? Oh, hell no, you are not kicking me out but keeping my stuff!

My heart froze again.

I hadn't even been pulled out of the driveway for five seconds when another guy, this one in a big truck, pulled up and took my place. I suddenly realized why I could not stay, but my stuff had been allowed to. She had replaced me.

My heart shattered like that mirror.

I spent almost a month on my best friend's sofa before he got tired of me. My cousin was murdered by her own son. My other best friend withdrew into himself when his dog had to be put down. One by one, the ties of my life unknotted themselves and fell to the ground like so many tears.

It took a little doing, but I eventually got myself a place. My old place, actually. It was a moth-eaten room in a rundown house in a shitty part of town that I paid way too much for. I had left it to be with Callie. She had abandoned me and put me back in that too-small, too-heartbreaking hell. I had no friends. I had no love. I only had a job and too much pain behind me.

I lasted a week. I lasted one week of looking into the mirror and wondering what had happened to me. I lasted one week of wondering what world I had ended up in, what world had stolen me from myself, one week of wondering if I was even the real 'me', or if I had ever been, before I broke my mirror into a thousand tiny, glittering pieces with my car's exhaust pipe, a length of duct, and some weatherproof tape.

I do not know how they found me, or if they even did. I did not have some great vision bestowed upon me at the end. I did not see them find my body and cry over it. I did not see my own funeral. There was no grand epiphany, no light at the end of the tunnel.

I could not see anything. I had broken my mirror.

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I could tell you that death is unpleasant. I could tell you that it was the single-most enlightening experience of my life. I could write you chapter and verse about death, how it felt to finally be home, somewhere I belonged.

I could, but I am disinclined to lie, and anything of that nature would be a bald-faced fabrication. I do not know how death feels, apart from the sensation of my esophagus desperately struggling to draw in oxygen in a car filled with tainted ‘air’ as I slowly, but surely, passed out.

There was a brief feeling of falling, of weightlessness, and then of something within me shattering into a thousand jagged shards. After that feeling...there was more weightlessness, and then, curiously enough, gravity had a hold of me again. There was a heartbeat above me, and everything sounded as though I had been submerged in fluid.

It was at that moment that I realized I had absolutely zero control over anything, but I could feel. I could feel everything. From the top of my bald, fluid-soaked cranium to the tip of my skinny, curled-up little tail. From the stubby little fingers to the equally-stubby little toes at the ends of my digitigrade legs. From the tiny, pink nose at the tip of my muzzle to the umbilical stuck in my….

Wait. TAIL?!

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As I said, I could not tell you what death feels like, as I was not there to experience it. I had been absconded from my world, from my body, and placed elsewhere.

I can, however, tell you in excruciating detail, and I will not lie, it was actually quite excruciating, how it feels to be born.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you any detail beyond ‘pain’, ‘more pain’, ‘oh God, something is suffocating me’, ‘why does it hurt so much’ ‘holy crap, my ass is suddenly very, very sore’, and ‘annnnd now my throat is sore, too’. I was deafening myself with my own screaming, which I will admit, sounded quite like that of a baby.

I was disoriented, all but blind as I could not open my Light-bedeviled eyes, freezing cold, and sore in places I had not known one could be sore in. All in all, I am relatively certain that all went according to Nature’s ways and wants, given that I felt like every baby I have ever seen (all two of them) born.

Well, except that I could still feel my tail.

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I find that, in this moment, I am quite forced to skip what was, at least to me, a highly-riveting period of time. My infancy, for that is, indeed, what it was, was spent as an adult mind in an infant’s body. I am quite certain that I went insane as a defence mechanism to prevent myself from going insane, if that makes any sense. You see, I was helpless. Utterly and completely unable to do anything at all, I was forced to wait for my musculature, my skeleton, even my own brain to solidify into something usable. I also spent quite a bit of time trying to sharpen my senses, which seemed to have only three modes at that age: abhorrently absent or excruciatingly enhanced at either extreme, with a tiny little smidge on the dial that liked to bounce around randomly anywhere from ‘1’ to ‘11’ that I labelled ‘acceptable’.

My body was weak. My skeleton was soft. I had features that I knew, without a doubt, did not belong on a human being. Was I a mutant? Was I even still human? If not, what was I? If so, where was I? Had I actually succeeded in killing myself? Was this the afterlife? What was that thing in my mouth? Ooh, that tastes almost like mil….

Thaaaaaaat was about the time my mind broke.

So, we catch up to when I was about two years old, at least by my reckoning. I could toddle about fairly well, especially with my tail, by now, and I was dealing with a very sharp pain at the base of that very same tail.

Not like that, you ninnies, my body had apparently gone and earned me a spanking whilst I was dancing with the butterflies for the sake of my sanity.

I was wearing a cloth diaper, and toddling about in a quadruplet of thin, off-woolen ‘socks’. And yes, I was ‘toddling’ about on all fours. I was in a smoky, hazy room, with stone walls, like, actually stone, uneven lumps of roughly-squared chunks of Light-bedamned pumice stone walls, with a fireplace at one side of the roundish walls, a simple cot opposite the door. A pot hung above the fire in the fireplace, and was filled with a slightly-bubbling, off-red thick gunk I could only describe as ‘really, really hot paste’. It smelled like capsaicin and anger, and looked like it would feel half as nice to the touch. The less said about how it looked like it tasted, the better.

There were hides strewn about the walls, two of them hanging from hooks in the wooden-cross-beams-with-thatch-covering ‘ceiling’. There was a form behind those hides...no, wait, there were two forms. Horizontal. On the cot. And one of them was moaning breathily.

It is sad that I can state, with one-hundred percent certainty, that I can tell the difference between a moan of pleasure given for real, and one given in a Light-benighted porno. And Little Miss ‘I-Have-Sex-With-A-Child-In-The-Room’ was doing her throaty, breathy best to try and upstage Jenna Jameson to steal the Oscar for ‘Best Fake Acting Ever’.

I almost lost my sanity again, right then and there.

Instead, though, I decided that I was quite done with that sort of crap, and I high-tailed it out of there. Which, interestingly enough, involved my tail being quite low, more in line with my spine and less perpendicular. Anyway, quite right, I ran out of the room, through another that was quite like it, only larger and with a small basket that was lined with a bare minimum of cushion, and slammed my skull right into a thick oaken door straight across from what I now realized was Little Miss Porn Star’s bedroom.

It was filled with more hides, lots of jars, a great many plants, actual rugs covering what my dainty little pawpads, yes, I had those too, were telling me was a dirt floor through the patchy holes in my ‘socks’, and, of course, that basket.

I will skip a lot of pathos here, because I was repeatedly drawn to that basket and did not know why until that night. That basket was mine. It was my bed.

Back in the relative ‘now’, however, my skull was reeling from its recent abuse, my ears kept twitching to face behind me at the sound of yet another rendition of ‘Girls Gone Wild: Spring Break’, complete with actual fucking yips. My tail was swaying in the rug as my forepaws sprang up to massage my poor abused skull, and then my claws went and made it worse by getting tangled up in my filthy, stringy, and utterly smelly blond hair.

I believe that is the moment I came to a horrid thought, and believed myself to be Porny McActress’ pet. I had a long, skinny tail, I was covered in dark, almost charcoal-coloured fur, and I had paws with claws that even now were extending into my already-abused scalp. Then I remembered the blond hair, and the diaper, and had an even more horrifying realization.

I was a furry. And I was a neglected child.

I was right. My logic was utterly abysmal, based solely on the fact that I absolutely stank of unwashed baby and was left to my own devices in a closed ‘cottage’ (that is being very damned generous for what amounted to a slightly-upgraded hut, if I am honest) with an open bedroom door and a basket that smelled like nothing I could describe as anything other than ‘me’.

On a completely unrelated note, cat senses suck so hard to get used to when you have no frame of reference.

As I said, when I realized I was in a feudal village, in the healer’s cottage, after another couple of hours of nursing my poor, almost-certainly-traumatized skull (what? I am quite attached to it, you know.) and exploring my extremely-limited and horrifyingly-stale-smelling environs, I realized I had rolled quite low on my ‘Logic’ test.

It was, indeed, a couple of hours later. I had decided to curl up in my basket and flop onto my back, legs splayed like I was a lazy cat who had no time for anything but tummy-rubs and pain when Breathy Mcfakemoans walked into what I had mentally labelled ‘the main room’, wearing an off-brown ‘tunic’ that resembled nothing so much as a shapeless sack under an actually-nice and well-attended white robe. I looked up at her, and my heart froze once more.

I recognized her. And no, I do not mean from memories that did not exist, created during a time when memories were extremely unlikely, if not outright impossible, to be created in an infant brain. No, I recognized her from my previous life, and this, I knew, was a dead-certain impossibility.

She was on the tall side of average for her genus, as I call them. Perky, triangular ears atop a lupine skull, covered in snow-white fur over most of her body, but her back and the top of her head were a riot of darker fur capped with actual black hair. Sharp, angry green eyes glancing at me once, in what I instantly knew with my adult reasoning to be pure, unadulterated hatred. She was a wolf. Worse, she was a wolf of the Valmorian mountains, as well as a disgraced citizen of Valmar’s one and only monastic village, Othrace.

Her name was Aislygn Balmung, and she was a character I had created for an original fiction that I had never published, never even written. She was a character from a story in my head.

After a quick glance down at myself, from my burlap diaper to my stringy, filthy blond hair and my feline paws and tail, I also knew, without a doubt that the bitch was my mother.

At least, in that moment, I had one comforting thought, scant though it was. I knew my name.

Oh, right, let me introduce myself. My name is Johnathan James Graves, though, at the time in question, my name was Johnathan James Aehric Alessandro Cayenne Domar Lecarde Balmung.

….Yes. Go ahead and laugh. I hate myself and my new body’s grandmother for that one. There was something about names of honour, and living up to their heroic legacy, and good omens and all that jazz.

At the time, though, I broke again.

What? You try finding out you have literally been reborn into the body of an original character you fucking invented while you are physically just a toddler, then realize you have condemned yourself to eight fucking years of systematic neglect, abuse, and pain, only to then realize you know what is going to happen to you when you are nine years old, and it is all your. Fucking. Fault. and try to keep your sanity from slipping down the self-defence drain!

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The interaction between body and soul is a curious thing. The soul is necessary for the body to operate, this is true. At least, in my belief, and, hey, in my experience, too, because I sure as hell was not in what I had spent over thirty years calling ‘my body’ anymore!

I am sorry, I just...this was an extremely stressful time for me, and even now, looking back on it...no, yeah, fuck that noise. Fuck it like it’s a prison bitch sharing a cell with a very large Shire stallion with glandular disorders, and they are all, stallion and disorders alike, named ‘Bubba’.

Anyway, my soul was present, so my body operated fairly normally. Breathing, movement, instinct. My body, however, was that of a fucking toddler, so I had...let’s be polite and call them ‘problems’. My body and soul were disparate, yet unified entities, each affecting the other. I was an adult soul, so my infant body was remarkably easier to get under control than is reasonable for a toddler so young. On the other paw, my body was giving me urges I cannot ever remember having, and my underdeveloped brain, while capable of creating memories at this point, was still an underdeveloped brain constantly being affected by slow-acting growth hormones common in children.

At least, that is what I am going to blame everything that happened to me when I was nine years old on, so there.

Right, let me backup and explain a little bit to you. I told you that Aislygn and Johnathan are original characters of mine, and the revelation that suddenly they were fucking real broke my mind, right? Well, that was a bit off. You see, they were characters I had made, yes, but fictional entities suddenly becoming real? That is not enough to break my brain. I have long been a believer of string theory, mirror universe theory, and quantum dissonance theory. All fiction is fact, somewhere, and all fact is fiction somewhere.

What broke my Light-benoosed mind was that I had written a character whose childhood was so broken and bereft of anything resembling love, at the hands of a character who was so beyond redemption it wasn’t even fit to be gallows-humour, and that I was living as the abused child in the situation.

You see, Johnathan Too-Many-Names-Shut-Up-Already Balmung was born in Othrace to Aislygn Balmung, the village healer and daughter of the monastery’s High Prophetess. Othrace is a village of wolfen, lupine furries who live a simple life that could quite easily be mistaken for a positively medieval society, and they do so by choice. Friends that I had brainstormed with to create the world of Cor, the planet I was situated upon, jokingly called the Valmorian mountain range ‘the Scottish Amish Puppy Mountains’.

There are many nations on Cor, all of which have their own culture, their own flair, their own social mores. The important bit comes in with the nation of Corenna, an extremely spartan, militaristic nation with a tradition of nonviolence. Wait a moment, it will make sense in a second.

Corenna is the single-largest country on one of the world’s ten continental masses. It became so large by being invaded, repelling the invaders, and defeating them so handily the aggressor nation had to be subsumed just to remain capable of feeding itself. For three thousand years, they bespoke peace, love, and unity, and then beat the ever-loving shit out of anyone who tried to tell them to shut up with more than words.

One such nation, Venezia, was rather sulky about being defeated, so they decided to try and revolt about fifty years after their capitulation. It went about as well as you might expect, but the important thing to note here is one of the families involved in the revolt.

The family in question is that of Armando Lecarde.

Corenna has a rather simple culture, which ends up seeming extremely complex in its simplicity. Okay, I’m fucking with you, Corenna’s a goddamned mire of laws and bullshit I am half-convinced I came up with when I was drunk, but anyway, one of their laws is ‘Selective Service Citizenship’. You sign up to serve your country, you become a citizen. Citizenship grants rights that vassals, the lower class of Corenna, are denied. Vassals are allowed to live, eat, and work. Corenna prides itself on being able to feed every one of its vassals. Citizens, though? They get to own shit. Citizens can own property, can work civil service jobs, they are allowed travel rights outside of Corenna’s Protectorate Treaties. Vassals? Nope. They live and work land that Citizens fucking own. It’s not slavery, but holy shit, it’s Dark Ages. The only saving grace the Vassals have is that Corenna is progressive as fuck.

Another law, which is important in this case, is the Expansion of Citizenship Rights for Meritorious or Devoted Service. Which is a fuckton of legalese way of saying, if you’re a good enough soldier, you’re not the only one who gets citizenship. You can assign citizenship up or down a number of generations equal to your ‘Expansion of Citizenship Rights’, meaning if you were selected for ‘one generation of expansion’, your siblings automatically become citizens, and you can bring in your parents or your children. Two generations, up or down to your grandparents and grandchildren, and so on.

Why is this important? Because the families of Venezia fucked up and rebelled. If merit earns you citizenship, what do you think criminal behavior gets you?

You lose your citizenship. Worse, if the crime is bad enough, you don’t just damn yourself to Vassalage (and prison, you don’t escape an eight-by-eight cell, either). You damn generations of your family.

So, the Lecardes conspired to commit treason. The eldest generation (out of two) had committed the crime, and a five-generation penalty was imposed upon the line. Atrezia Lecarde, the oldest son of Armando Lecarde, immediately challenged his father’s capability as the head of the family, and turned him in. For this, they were allowed to keep their family estate, though they could not stay in it, for the five generations, with the caveat that the sixth generation would fulfill their restored ability to join the military of Corenna.

Oh, right, forgot to mention that. If you lose generational citizenship, and the crime is bad enough, those generations are not allowed to join the military to restore their citizenship. It is a harsh fucking ban.

So, in comes James Montoya Lecarde, son of Loric, son of Arron, son of Louisa, daughter of Ezio, son of Tulio, son of Atrezia Lecarde. After the Second Fall of Venezia, the Lecarde family became very, very big on honour.

James signed up for the Corenna Armed Forces on his fifteenth birthday, the youngest you were allowed to enlist without parental permission. By the time he was twenty-five, he was a Captain, highly-decorated, and he had earned three generations of Citizenship that he immediately forsook for himself and granted from his father all the way up to his great-grandfather.

He also served during the Third Fall of Venezia, yeah, they just could not fucking learn, and was wounded in action, nearly killed, rescuing the kidnapped heir to the throne, then-Prince Reginald Leonidas, from another formerly-noble Venezian House, the Mountebanks.

Prince Reginald, then the Hereditary Marshal of the Nation of Corenna’s Armed Forces, returned home to his sick father, who had presided over the entirety of the war in ill-health, and assumed the throne, appointing his rescuer and now-friend, James Lecarde, as his new Non-Hereditary Marshal.

James is still the second-youngest Non-Hereditary Marshal, the highest non-royal military rank possible, on the books.

So, the Venezian war dies down, Reginald marries, and has a baby girl named Evelyn that James just -dotes- on. He adores her so much that he declares war when he finds a pale, skinny, furless ape in her chambers, making arcane gestures above her crib.

The ‘ape invader’ was an elf. So, James declared war on the elves, and good old Regger backed him up, despite neither knowing of the actual nature of the ‘attack’. Hell, even I don’t know, and I wrote it. Anyway, their millenia-old tradition of not being the aggressor shaky, but presumably intact, they went to war. The Elven nation was, unfortunately, across a mountain range, a desert, and then an ocean, so they had to fly out...yeah.

Long story short, the Marshal’s transport was shot down over the Valmorian Mountain Range. Aislygn found James Lecarde. Did I mention James Lecarde, and the Lecarde family as a whole, are panther furries? James, himself, was a melanistic tiger. A black panther.

Yeah, they boned. Well, more like Aislygn boned James when he was well enough.

Aislygn is….well, she’s a bitch. And a slut. She had ten boyfriends, all of them the ‘wealthier’ nobility of the fairly-large village that I will continue to call a village despite it being more like a city, shut up. Anyway, she was a gold digger. She saw James Lecarde’s rank tabs, and had to get her some wealthy Marine lovin’.

Every single citizen of Othrace is lupine. Aislygn never used protection. Never. So all ten of her noble boyfriends thought the pregnancy was theirs. Johnathan was born feline. Aislygn’s cushy life of sex-and-leisure disappeared when ten boyfriends realized they were not, in fact, her only one. Kinda hard to have a feline baby when the only thing around is lupines. Oh, wait, there was that feline Army guy….yeah, you know where this is going.

Aislygn blamed Johnathan. The boyfriends, all of whom had clout in the city council, blamed Johnathan and Aislygn. Are we caught up with reality? Do you see where this is going?

Right, moving along. Where was I? Oh, right. Soul and body. My soul was adult, and managed to get me moving along at a slightly faster developmental pace, which, by the way, is actually pretty painful. Turns out we grow at our own rates because that is what is healthiest for our tiny, baby bodies! I cannot tell you the number of times I twisted my ankle or pulled a muscle. And no, before you ask, you do not ever want to pull a muscle in your tail.

On the other paw, I was a toddler who lived in a cit-village that actually hated me. I mean, we are talking Jinchuuriki levels of hate. And worse, I had a mother who hated me just as much. My poor little brain needed love.

More than the sparse encouragements my grandmother gave, anyway. She was the High Prophetess, she was busy, and she absolutely did not want to display favoritism or disfavor, because absolute power blah blah blah. Honestly, when I wrote her, the Hiruzen-like moral schtick made sense, but now that I was living her grandson’s life, I could not help but hate the bitch juuuuuusssssst a little bit. Also myself, for fucking writing her that way.

Yes, by this point, I was flat-out tripping balls insane, by the way. I was in a fictional character’s body, living his fictional character abused childhood, after killing my nonfictional body with a nonfictional dose of nonfictional carbon monoxide. And learning fictional furry martial arts from fictional furries I nonfictionally invented when I was nonfictional.

Oh, right, I forgot to mention that. Have you ever seen or heard of an abused partner remaining with their abuser? I am absolutely certain you have. Abused children defending their abusive parents’ actions? Yes. Do you know why?

It’s not love. It’s a need for love. That’s the sick, twisted thing about abuse. An abuser almost always knows this, seemingly instinctively. They can cow their family, their targets, with violence, and make them grateful for it with carefully-doled out words of endearment, or maybe even the occasional hug.

I got no hugs. I wanted love, damnit. I wanted my fucking mommy to love me. So I did what almost every abused child ever does. I went and made myself a better son.

When I was six, I enrolled in my grandmother’s temple to learn how to become a monk. In two years, I was capable of fighting with every single one of my limbs except my tail restricted. By the time I was eight, I had mastered the Apprentice school of the art and was flexible enough to start seriously wishing I was a Light-beshriven adult again.

When Aislygn was told, she beat me black and blue up and down the Temple’s plaza and mezzanine, including the stairs, with the Master school against my Apprentice school. She called me worthless.

I was worthless at the martial arts in her estimation? Well, then, I would do something better. So, I picked up magic.

I knew it was coming. I knew what was going to happen. I hated myself, I cried myself to sleep for a year and change over it. I tried to change it. I tried not to do it.

But damnit...after the life I had lived already, the life I had given up because nobody loved me, I was not going to give up hope that maybe someday, someway, someone here would.

Magic in Cor is unique, as far as I can tell, and as far as I tried to make it. Everyone has a magical center, a series of nodes and valves in their Ethereal Selves that allows them to channel mana. Mana, by nature, is always neutral. Aspected spells, such as those aligned with Elements or Ideals, are released through the Ethereal Nodes into spell matrixes that alter the mana’s alignment, converting it into usable Aether for spells.

Tee-ell-dee-arr, your soul draws in and generates water, which runs through soul-veins, and when you want to make shit different MTG colors, you hook it up to an adapter called a ‘spell matrix’. Which you cast by moving your hands and saying words and sometimes using material components shut up it’s what I came up with.

You do not try to alter your core. That shit stays neutral. Period. Bad Shit Happens if you fuck with magical cores. Have you ever seen Fullmetal Alchemist? This is the ‘Human Transmutation’ of Spell Matrices.

Othrace lacked a dedicated group of mages. They had a narcoleptic old wolf who had last cast a spell about thirty years before, and the Amish Puppies all still looked at him kinda funny for it.

So, like I had made Johnathan do when I wrote him, I stole all his books and studied them alone while I was recovering from getting my tail beat like a drum in the Journeyman school of Preying Wolf. When I was nine, the bitch caught me at my studies.

See, what I had intended to do was take up healing magic, to make her ‘job’ as a healer easier. I showed off a cauterization spell. Barely a tiny fireball, but it took a lot of refinement in a matrix that took a metric fuckton of mana to simultaneously focus the fire into a small, but hot enough form to direct over open wounds, as well as alter the neuter mana into Fire Aether.

She swatted my paws and called me ‘fucking useless’ while I was still weaving mana into Fire Aether. You do not fucking interrupt a spell matrix. That makes shit explode. Like, no, seriously.

So, quick question. How do you mitigate an explosion immediately before it happens? You deny it the catalyst. You take the gunpowder out of the dynamite, pull the nitro out of the glycerin. The catalyst in every single spell, all over Cor, is mana. Mana is gasoline for magic. I was channelling mana into the matrix, which, when disrupted, destabilized. So, I did the only thing I could do.

I channelled all of the pure mana, and with it, the Fire Aether into my Ethereal Self. My ‘magical core’.

Remember how I told you that you do not fuck with the magical core?

I fucked with my magical core.

The thing about mana is, like I said, it’s neutral. Neuter. Colorless. Unaspected, unaligned. It’s a glass of pure spring water.

Which I had proceeded to dump a fuckton of ‘red food coloring’ into. Have you ever tried to ‘uncolor’ dyed water? My Ethereal Self was lit on fire, and my right arm, which I had used to channel the Fire Aether into my core, was burning from the inside out.

It was three days of pain, burning, and fear. Three days in my grandmother’s temple, screaming my throat literally bloody, while watching the fire eat my right arm from the inside out.

I had known it would happen. I had always known it would happen. I had done this to Johnathan years and years and years before, when I first made him. I had seen it coming. And I did all I could to change it without changing it. Because I wanted someone to fucking love me.

I broke again. Another thousand shattering little motes of sparkly light crashed to the floor and ruined my reflection.

I gave up on love. I gave up on everything in Othrace. I gave up on granny and her fucking milquetoast ‘morals’ bullshit, I gave up on Aislygn and her slut-mongering gold-digging child-neglecting abuse. I gave up on James Lecarde, who I knew was not dead, but trapped in a cell in the Temple, still under Aislygn’s ‘care’, while she raped him over and over to produce another child, one she could use to claim generational rights in Corenna when she was old enough. I gave up on the little sister I knew, even then, was growing inside of her, who I knew would be called Jeannette Aslyana Balmung.

I just gave up. Nobody loved me. Nobody loved me in my old life. Nobody loved me in this life. Not even me. So, why bother hoping for love?

All it had ever done was hurt me.

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Martial artists are hard-pressed to continue their lives with a limb missing. Mages have it even more rough, and worse, I was kind of super-crippled. See, I hadn’t just burned my arm off in a particularly-nasty way, I had permanently Aspected my magical core. Every single spell I would ever try to cast would be Fire-aligned, whether the matrix said it should be or not. And that is if the matrix managed to remain stable when its gasoline was already burning in the hose, so to speak.

There would also be the matter of the fucking pants-shittingly debilitating pyrophobia I had developed to contend with, as well.

Like I said, body and soul. In this case, my soul had known fire was bad since I was four years old as a human. Fire was bad, but controllable under the right conditions, right? Right.

My body, on the other hand? Fuck that noise. If there was so much as a lit candle within ten feet of me, I was about a mile away within a couple of minutes, if I didn’t freeze up so strongly as to literally lock my digitigrade knees so hard it took days for me to walk without needing to move on all threes afterward.

So, yeah. I was never casting magic again. Let me tell you, living in a world where literal goddamned magic is a thing, and being so terrified of your own, natural ability in magic that even humming a cantrip and snapping your fingers can make you pass out from fear and suffer night terrors for the next week to go along with the phantom sensation of your missing arm serving as the fuel in a magical bonfire? That fucking blows. It blows rancid, vomit-flavored diseased baboon spunk, and then it gargles with AIDS-afflicted skunk-with-a-necrotizing-fasciitis-of-the-anus diarrhea. And then it goes back for seconds.

Grandma could not help but see this about me. All of it. Missing limb, phobia, loss of balance, inability to do martial arts and magic...all of it. So, grandma finally did something decent by me and called on an old ‘friend’ of hers, who was actually her great-by-about-a-hundred-times grandfather, another character I invented.

His name is Agrias Saestas. Yes, I named him after a female Final Fantasy Tactics character, shut up, I made him when I was like, thirteen and thought Agrias Oaks was a dude. Go to Hell.

Agrias is the son of my first original character, a divine elf named Serenol Muirin. Serenol was cursed to turn into a werewolf, blah blah blah necromancer, blah blah blah kingdom, blah blah blah saved the day, blah, married, blah kids, blah died and went on to Godhood.

Nothing really interesting, really. Stop looking at me like that.

Anyway. Agrias and his brother, Seagryn, were born wolves to a pair of elves. Serenol died, their mommy was a bitch and dropped them off at the Valmorian monastery (which was full of elves at that point), and ran off to be a queen. She was later shanked in her sleep in a ladyboy whorehouse.

Agrias and Seagryn grew up humbly, but each learned an aspect of the Preying Wolf. Agrias took to the defensive style, Seagryn the offensive. Agrias, the younger sibling, was calm, quiet, and thoughtful. Seagryn was angry and pissy and a fucking diva. Agrias was named the heir, and would be named King. Seagryn murdered the head of the Temple, and Agrias was forced to put him down. Shit happened, Agrias lost an eye, more shit happened, love, new eye, life, yay, puppies.

Puppies which eventually moved into the Valmorian mountain village when the elves abandoned it because they were racist little sissies who didn’t want one of their holy sites being ‘desecrated’ by werewolf cooties. Fucking pansies. Yes, I know I wrote them that way. Shut up.

Anyway, Agrias is like, three thousand years old. How do you explain that? Well, in simple terms, he’s fucking Maui. He’s a demigod. Closer to ‘god’ than ‘demi’. He became a Cleric, himself, and one day found out he was powering his own prayers. So he studied medicine, and took the portfolio of Healing for himself. He then went on to spend three thousand years living amongst the vast populations around the planet. Except for the elves, he never really fit in with them. Or the dragons, because seriously, those fuckers were bigger than he is, and he is a Dire-blooded wolfen.

Oh, right. Agrias is twelve feet tall, in mortal form, and has not stopped growing since he was born. And he is a demigod Dire Wolf Cleric with 3000 years of XP gain behind him, and he does not fuck with the dragons of Cor.

Fast forward to ‘today’, relatively speaking, anyway.

So, Agrias came by to pick me up, and took me to his first home, the ruins of his father’s house from waaaaaaaay the fuck back when. He said he liked to keep it in shape for nostalgic reasons, and, okay, I’ll be honest, it was miles ahead of the bullshit ‘healer’s hut’ Mommy Dearest kept me in. And I got my own bed, too, no more kitty basket.

But what he called a ‘ruin’....fuck, Buckingham Palace would be a ‘hut’. I’ll put it that way.

So, he took me in, taught me medicine. Under his tutelage, I was a better healer than my own bitch of a puppy-farm in under two months. My arm still bothered me, though. So, he did what I knew he would, and offered to teach me what he called ‘the Wonder of Machines’. I called it ‘I am joining the Enterprise as Montgomery Scott, so suck it, Spock!’.

It took a bit of doing, what with me being a teenaged, one-armed, ground-bound never-be-a-fire-eater, but eventually, Agrias petitioned an old buddy of his, Voltan. Voltan, the God of Iron and Ingenuity, Master of the Forge and Fire. Voltan, whose appearance caused me to ‘spontaneously teleport’ twenty miles away.

Did I mention I was afraid of fire? Also, my legs were fucking sore.

So, yeah, it took a bit, but Voltan saw ‘my spark’, which I knew to mean my Ethereal Self, and proclaimed me ‘the best birthday gift anyone had ever given him’.

Gods have issues, man.

He gave me the most powerful blessing he could without me being his Son (yes, the capital letter is necessary), and that woke up my own body’s Divine blood through Agrias, diluted as it was, and….well….

Okay, fine. I was fucking high as a kite. I was tripping Ethereal God Balls. I was livin’ loose, and layin’ large. I was tripping the light fantastic, and spouting the Magical Technicolour Yawn. I was God-level Stone-face Blitzed. I had lived my life off of water, and gotten drunk off an entire brewery’s worth of the finest Dwarven Stout.

I still have no fucking clue how I did it, but when I woke up, I had an arm again. It was skeletal, absolutely basic as a prosthesis, and it was bolted to my ribcage and shoulder blade.

So, that happened. It was a whole thing. From that point on, I could See machinery. I could plan it. I could build it. I understood it. I knew it. I was its Master.

So I built a better arm. This one, I had to have Agrias help me install, because while I was Divinely Gifted in the realm of Mechanisms, I was...eh….at medicine. At least I was certainly skilled enough to know that you do not do an implant-removal-and-replacement, especially for something bolted to your skeleton (like, no, literally, I mean ‘bolted’) on your own damned self. This one was...okay, the new one was technically accurate to the canon of my own original fiction. Technically. If you squint at it hard enough.

See, the Divine Gift I had been given included a retroactive eidetic memory. I could remember almost everything my brain was capable of remembering. That included large chunks of what I instinctively ‘saved’ to my ‘hard drive’ before I ‘rebooted’.

This included Fullmetal Alchemist, shut up, sit, and rotate on the finger.

Fine. My new arm was an automail arm, complete with direct-nerve-stimulating connection. It was Ed’s arm. Tell me that any nerd given the Keys to Engineering and missing their fucking right arm wouldn’t do the same.

Fuck off, I was a nerd. I’m still a nerd. Just...not nerdy enough for what was going to come, eventually. Or at least, definitely nerdy enough, just not nerdy enough in the right direction.

Right, so, new arm. Installed that sucker, and Agrias and I spent weeks checking to make sure everything was working fine. It kinda sucked, though, do you have any idea how much it hurts to just grow when you have a mechanical monstrosity bolted to your own skeleton? It fucking hurts. It fucking hurts a lot!

Agrias kept training me in Preying Wolf, though he called his sub-style of it ‘Silent Sentinel’, which, admittedly, was all on him. I did not come up with that. I made it through the Journeyman school, and was busy expanding my knowledge of medicine and engineering at a breakneck pace. By the time I was thirteen, I had built my own rudimentary motorcycle. Admittedly, I had a lot of cheats, because Agrias was constantly hauling ore and materials into a foundry and smithy he had literally miracle’d up out of nowhere.

He taught me to make my own molds. He taught me how to break them. He taught me about metals, alloys, and chemical interactions. Most importantly, he taught me how to learn.

I know what you’re thinking. ‘But Johnathan, you died when you were thirty, and now you’re thirteen, so you have had forty-three years of learning experience’, yeah, bullshit.

Learning is more than retaining information. It’s more than critical thinking. It’s even more than practical application. Learning how to learn is learning how to organize, empathize, and theorize about and with new data as you receive it.

It’s like Naruto, who is amazing at instinctive learning and growth, but absolute and utter shit at theory and bookwork, is half of an equation, and Hermione Granger, who takes top marks in theory, but never manages to connect all of the information in her head to practical applications in any sort of reasonable time-frame, is the other half. Put them together, and what do you have?

...No, seriously, I don’t know. Ugh, fuck it, whatever.

So, I learned how to learn.

One thing Agrias never tried to teach me, though, was how to open myself back up. See, I appreciated all that he was doing for me. I liked learning, I loved engineering, I even liked medicine. But...I did not love him. I never asked him if he loved me. He was doting on me, yes, but...I could not love him. I never opened up that part of me to him. It certainly did not help that, in my mind, I kept calling him a fictional character that I had made up.

Looking back...I think that’s why he was always sad when he was around me. He knew he’d gotten to me too late. I had lost more than my arm. I had lost my love, my friends, my life, my species, my family, my hope...and then I had lost my magic, my arm, and my capacity for love.

I think...as broken as I was, I think that was what broke him.

He took me to a tombstone, lower down in the mountains, a few days before my fifteenth birthday. He gave me a single dog-tag on a chain, a thick, blue crystalline thing inscribed with my father’s name, date of birth, blood type, and serial number. There was a thick, sealed metal ‘chamber’ at the top of the tag, which I knew was a Corenna Marine Distress Signal. That detail, by the way? That’s important.

Agrias told me about James Lecarde, and told me that I was old enough to enlist, if I wanted to.

Johnathan would have cried. Johnathan does cry at that empty grave, in my story. But me….I just said that I was Johnathan James Graves, and I walked away.

Johnathan loved his daddy, and wanted to live up to his example.

I just wanted to get away from all the fucking wolves. So I turned and I left one behind, crying in front of an empty grave.

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Corenna deals with foreign nationals joining their country in a pretty straightforward manner.

“Hello, Random Foreign National applying for entry into Corenna! Do you wish to become a citizen?”

“Fucking straight, I do!”

“Boot camp for you!”

I had to enlist, just to become more than an entry-level wage slave to some snooty asshat who thought his grain was the greener side of the fence. So, of course, I enlisted. I went from ‘Johnathan James Graves’ to ‘N-1 Serviceman Graves’ and got my tail shipped off to basic combat training.

Do you have any idea how fucking difficult it is to hide a mechanical arm under what amounts to a spandex sleeve made of dyed tree-rubber and your own fur sheddings?

Oh, right. One thing about the Corenna Armed Forces - disabilities are death. You lose a limb, you are immediately discharged from service with the full benefits of whatever rank you achieved counting towards your Citizenship Rights.

I was entering as an N-1, or ‘fucking noob’ for those keeping count, which meant I had fuck-all for rights. If I was discharged now, I would end up a K-1, or ‘Knave’, which was basically their version of a ‘conscientious objector’. Any rank, K, V, P, or N-1, is a non-Citizen.

I was not going to be a fucking wage-slave again. Fuck that noise.

So, boot camp happened. I hid my arm (with great fucking difficulty). And then I met her.

Sasha Norman. She was in charge of my training cadre. A fiery-hot, red-haired lioness who was as wild as a cold winter night is long. She was a party girl who believed that if she had not wrung every bit of fun and tease as she could out of any given day, the whole week was a fucking waste of time.

I knew I would meet her. I tried to stay off of her radar. It didn’t work.

You see, in my last life, I had...let’s call it ‘mustered out’ of the Army after BCT. Basic training was old hat, to me. I’d gone through it before. I knew all the tricks. Keep your head down, but not so low you’re sniffing dirt. Middle of the pack doesn’t end up on the rack. That sort of thing. It’s all about not getting noticed, right?

Well, she fucking noticed. For the second time in as many lives, I was a Cadet Commander of my own barracks. Fuck. My. Life.

She pushed me. I let her push me. I was not about to quit, not when failing could cost me my precious, precious not-a-wage-slave-life. She got close to me. She forced her way in.

By the end of boot camp, my teenaged love-starved hormone-addled brain had me half-convinced I was in love with her, even though I knew what and who she was.

Oh, right, backtrack, backtrack. Um...Sasha. Sasha was a lioness with bright blue eyes and rich dyed-whatever hair that she kept in whatever wild hairdo she felt like it at the time. It was normally what I think is called a side-hawk, where one side of her head is shaved bald and the rest is combed over the other side in a weird, spiky, jagged mess...whatever, I’ll just say, on Earth, in her civvies, she’d fit right on in as a pierced punk princess at a Green Day concert.

Emphasis on the ‘princess’.

The royal family have been lions for generations. Like, a whole bunch of them, I never bothered to chart it out. Anyway, there’s a tradition. Well, more like a law. Yes, another one. Anyway, you can’t legally be an heir to the throne unless you have served in the military. And I mean, no, seriously, you are not in line unless you put your life -on- the line.

So, punk princess Sasha? She kinda-sorta led a night life where she was actual-Princess Evelyn Leonidas, who was particularly famous for her long, lustrous, red hair. And Sasha? She likes to rainbow her hair, like, seriously, every colour ever. I’ve seen a fucking hex chart on her vanity. But before the big reveal that comes at the end of the Second Elfen War, she never, ever uses red.

I had zero chance. Like, ever. She’s Johnathan’s total besty, inseparable-from-the-hip and all that, but that’s the story. For me? Johnathan doesn’t have a crush, he is full-on devoted to her, mind, body, soul in love with her until he hits his early twenties.

Me? Well, she became my best friend. And no, neither Johnathan nor I would have -ever- stood a fucking chance, because we have wedding tackle incompatible with her wedding cake. Or, well, whatever the polite way of saying she prefers kitty carpets to kitty...um….

Lesbian, damnit, she’s a lesbian! Fuck!

So, Sasha Norman, my training cadre’s instructor, picked me up and made me be the best I fucking could be, and along the way, she made my ice-cold heart start beating again. I graduated Best of Class...or would have, if she and the Tee-Cee hadn’t discovered my prosthetic arm. It took a lot of sweet-talking (and the benefit of knowing the script) to keep my ass where I was, but they docked me. I graduated third in class.

Johnathan does, too, by the way. It’s a sore point, but he eventually finds out Sasha wanted him to graduate third, because that way, she’d pick him for her squad, which needed one more soul to qualify for action.

Johnathan? The way I made him, he’s a fucking genius of battle. He could take StarCraft and make all the South Korean Championship teams cry. Martial artist, sharpshooter, mechanical arm...total bastard to fuck with on the battlefield, but where he shines is Combat Monitor. He is the tactical soul of Ermine Squad. Pays for it by being a total social dunderhead. I mean, if D&D stats applied to real life, he made Charisma his dump stat, and then stole from it to give the points to other shit. Like...he’d be negative score, if you could.

Me? I...eh. I could maybe place 1000 out of 1000 if I tried really, really hard at StarCraft? I had martial arts and sharpshooting, I absofuckinglutely refuse to use magic for reasons I have already explained, and I had a metal arm. I had about as many social graces as the boy whose body I occupied, only mine were crippled where his were stillborn, and I had a chip on my shoulder, plus the rest of the bag, with a full selection of dipping sauces to boot.

Fuck, now I’m hungry.

Anyway, so, Ermine Squad. Made up of myself, as the point-mammal, front man, the anchor, whatever you want to call it. Sasha was our sniper, Vodka Friedkin, an adorably-short polar bear that hated vodka and adored giving rib-cracking hugs to me (and let’s not forget the super strength) was our heavy weapons and demo-bear, and William Edward Pryce Balmoral the Third, a stag with his nose so high up in the air he would have managed to bury it in Apollo’s ass at high noon if we were in Ancient Greece. Oh, and the ‘noble’ fuck that wanted, with all of his might, to fucking fly was our skirmisher and spotter.

Why, no, the little shit still has no idea why I would break out into giggle-fits whenever I called him ‘Wesley Wyndham-Pryce’, who, in case you are wondering, is the character that partially inspired him.

We did eventually separate his antlers from his ass, and he mellowed out once I made him a flight harness. You did not fuck with him after that. William was a fucking nightmare with his flight pack and shotgun.

Anyway, so, Ermine Squad. A four-soldier fireteam that was kitted out for long-haul action behind enemy lines, and that was us. The Second Elfen War was kicking into high gear, and we were rolling out as soon as I finished BCT.

….Yeah, I’m gonna skip a bunch of boring war crap and get to the next important bit. Fuck, man, I don’t want to remember all of this shit. I did things I’m not proud of, I watched people I fought side-by-side with do shit that still makes me want to puke. I am not reliving that shit when I have a fucking choice about it.

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So, the long and short of it is, I spent three years in the trenches with the rest of Ermine. I earned a hell of a lot of scars in that time, and I remember the story behind each and every one of them. No, you have not, in fact, supplied me with enough alcohol to know about even a single one of them, fuck off, that’s personal.

I did not want to become friends with them. I just wanted to serve my time and get my papers. I did not want to be all that I could be. I did not want to be a role model. I did not want to eventually follow in my father’s footsteps and become the Marshal of the Corenna Armed Forces.

I was already a Marine, damnit, what more did they fucking want of me?

So, anyway, in those trenches, I found a lot of enemy tech. The elves are primarily magic users, and holy shit their magic is fucking phenomenal. Corenna mages mostly think practically with their spells. ‘I want to light shit on fire, so I make a spell that lights shit on fire.’ If it’s useless in a fight, or takes too long to get off in a fight, or...pretty much anything that means you might lose a fight? That shit’s useless.

Elves, on the other hand? They live and breathe magic. It is their bread and butter. Airships, artillery, fucking caster shells from motherfucking Outlaw Star and no I did not write them having that shit holy fuck.

Their magic was amazing. Their tech was...kinda meh, honestly, but they thought differently and had a different design philosophy, so I used what I could and cobbled together myself a little something that made me nerdgasm when it was done.

See, I was the point-man. That meant I was the firefight director, I called shots, and I made the enemy shoot at me instead of Sasha or William. So, I had a four-weapon loadout.

First was my CASA-130 Lex, my standard-issue sidearm, which I modified like hell into a transforming tonfa that fired .45M ACP. The modification was severe enough I eventually rebranded it the TMSA-145 Ebon Echo. Then, I modified my battle rifle, the CABR-131 into a caster-enabled .50HCBR that could also transform into a shield and a one-handed battlehammer I named the TMBR-1000 Sierra Staccato.

After a year in combat, Sasha found my dad’s dog-tag and realized I was the old Marshal’s kid. She gave me my dad’s old CASA-150 G. Lex, which I modified into transforming tonfa TMSA-150 Alpha Lucis, which fired .50HCACP. When I necked that fucker up, I kinda...well, all I’ll say is that I can only fire that loud bastard with my mechanical arm and leave it there, alright?

And last, but not least, was Reginald Leonidas’ own Corenna Royal Cavalry Pistol, a six-shot revolver that I modified to fire .60MCACP from its native .50HCACP. I call it the Kingsguard. ...I respect that gun too much to make it transform, though, even now. King Reginald deserves at least that much from me.

…..No, I am not a gun-nut. Put that flag away, you ass. I am not an alt-right hardcase, I just like my guns. Why? Because I took those weapons and made them badass. I believe I have a right to be justifiably proud of making the smallest caliber weapon out of the four I had need ammo that would make Dirty Harry weep with joy. This was my rifle, and these were my guns. There are not many (make that none) like them, and these ones were mine.

….Yes, I watched RWBY. Apparently, so did you. So shut up.

Anyway, so, yeah. There I am with at least three hand-cannons and the battle rifle from Hell, each capable of firing rounds that would fuck up heavy armor at a minimum, and when I’m not using my battle rifle, I’ve got a nifty little kite shield to let them plink off of. I needed Elfen tech to accomplish this.

I got into the habit of pillaging it. Yes, that’s important, haven’t you ever heard of Johnathan’s Gun? ...Fuck off, I am perfectly capable of pronouncing my vees, Chekov. No, I do not have any nuclear ‘wessels’.

Anyway, by the end of three years, I loved and trusted Sasha, William, and Vodka more than my cold, dead heart would ever want to admit. You kinda don’t really get a choice when someone whips off their shirt to keep a bullet hole in your thigh from bleeding out long enough to get your bullet-magnet ass to a M.A.S.H in relatively good nick. Especially when they didn’t have time to put a bra on before the firefight started.

…Just because I was a cold, selfish, heartless wreck of a former human being does not mean my junk has ever been in anything other than perfectly-working condition, and holy shit does Sasha have a great rack, or what? You have no idea how many times I cursed myself fucking stupid for writing a primo lady like that as a woman’s woman. Holy fucking hell, I mean, she’s a twenty-five out of ten on a bad day…

Oh. Sorry, um...where was I?

Right, so, anyway, there I am, at the end of three years, closer to three other beings than I ever was to my own family, in any timeline, and I realize I done fucked up. I woke up one morning, and my dad’s dog-tag was blinking.

I was eighteen, and James Lecarde was still a baby-factory for Bitches Claws and her little elf, my then-nine-year-old-sister, Jeannette, had been due to start sneaking in to find ‘her daddy’ soon. There was a whole storyline I had plotted out that basically ends up with Johnathan charging back to Valmar when that little light goes off.

The Distress Signal. It was quantum-entangled with the other dog-tag and a beacon back in Corenna’s Emergency Rescue Unit. The problem was, I had avoided a couple of missions that would have had me in the ERU due to a bad case of ‘bullets-to-the-vitals-itis’.

Well, at least I was healthy.

So, I told Sasha, and she called the FOB. At this point, she had been appointed Marshal, and assigned us to the ERU for the recovery mission. This was very, very bad, because Sasha being back at the Leonidas Estate while Johnathan was in the ERU was the only thing that saved Reginald’s life from an assassin. I told her to head back to the castle, that I had a ‘bad feeling’ (what I had been passing off my foreknowledge as), stole a mechachopper, and high-tailed it to Valmar. Which, again, oddly enough, was done with my ridiculously overlong tail being quite low to the ground.

….Relatively speaking, anyway.

Anyway, long story short, I made it back to Valmar, met my little sister, freed my very, very ill-health father, confronted my mother, and shit went so pear-shaped I understand why Ten (or is it Eleven, now, actually?) told Martha Jones not to do something stupid like eat one because he didn’t want to wake up in three months and taste that.

Aislygn had gone fucking nuts.

Remember how I said I had been gathering and hoarding Elfen tech? Well, I hadn’t exactly had time to offload my latest batch at the FOB before I woke up to a blinking QEC Distress Signal, so I’d fobbed it into the back of the mechachopper I stole.

I did not know it, but there was a grenade in the batch with a fucked up space-time enchantment on it. Aislygn had stolen it, pulled the pin, and grabbed her daughter, my little sister, and held it to her throat.

If I shoot her, Jeannie dies. If I don’t, Aislygn wins.

While I did not want Aislygn to win, by any stretch, fuck that noise. The bitch deserved season tickets to Hell for the next dozen eternities, if I had any say in the matter. On the other hand, though, I did not want Jeannie to die.

Jeannie was my favorite character in my own little world. I had written her as an awesome little sister for Johnathan. Yeah, I kind of wrote her to be that way to spite my own, bitchy-ass cunt of a little sister in my old life, but that did not change that Jeannie was genuinely an awesome little kitten.

Snow-white fur, absolutely pure snow-white fur, with a tuft of blonde hair she wore like Johnathan’s, pulled behind her head in a long, single braid. She was a curious, sweet, adorable little klutz whose ultimate dream was to be her beloved big brother’s assistant, and help him change the world with his mecha.

She would eventually become what I called his ‘pit boss’, acting simultaneously as an eye in the sky for his missions as well as his chief of staff and second-best mechanic in the company he would eventually create, Tombstone Mechanisms. She was amazing, and would eventually serve as the cornerstone of Johnathan’s sanity. She never felt anything but love for her big brother. She never felt anything but love, period. Well...love and pain. Her catchphrase was ‘Ouchie! Wait, I’m okay!’ for a reason.

She was a total sweetie, who would one day go on to develop a romance with, and marry, Evelyn Leonidas’ younger brother, James Leonidas, who would, in fact, go on to be King. She deserved all the best. She was, without a doubt, my favorite character.

I did not want her to die, even if I had utterly, completely, and totally fucked her destiny without the benefit of lube. I wasn’t that heartless.

So I did the intelligent thing, and I holstered my weapons and tried to negotiate with the crazy bitch that held her hostage.

I made it within ten feet before the rest of Ermine popped up from behind the mechachopper, guns aimed right at her head. She went crazy. I grabbed Jeannie with my tail and flung her sideways, towards Vodka, and did something so monumentally stupid I will never, ever be able to forget it.

The grenade fell, and Jeannie, Sasha, William, and Vodka were in range. The locking guard popped out, and I leapt onto the fucker, Fire Aether swirling around my flesh-and-blood arm as I grabbed it and hugged it to my chest.

At least I managed to draw Alpha Lucis and put a bullet in the crazy bitch’s head before the fucker went off.

The last thing I heard, as I stared forlornly at Ermine and my estranged family, was tinkling, like a thousand tiny shards of glass striking the mountain side.

And that would be the second time I died.

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I expected the darkness. I expected death. I expected to hear a heartbeat, and to feel a loss of control as I floated in yet another fucking sack of amniotic fluid. I did not expect to feel pain, at least not that early. I did not expect to feel the weight of Alpha Lucis as I raised my still-mechanical right paw to my head. I did not expect to feel my other weapons situated where they belonged, in their holsters.

And no, I did not expect to wake up, face to face, with a fucking pastel-rainbow-haired, horned, and winged Night-bedamned pony right in my fucking face. I think I can be forgiven for what happened after that.

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Chapter 1 - Kittens in Hasbroland

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Chapter 2 - Building a Better Cattrap

Mirrors are strange.

You might not think it so, but they have personality. They have their own loyalties, their own balance, if you will.

Some mirrors tell the truth, and reflect your image accurately. Some lie, and make you look skinny, tall, fat, small. Some mirrors are unbreakably steadfast, forged from material stronger than any living being could ever hope to be.

Some shatter like spun sugar.

Would you be surprised if I told you that they have a sense of vengeance, of justice, of bloodthirst? That whole ‘seven years of bad luck’ you’ve heard of isn’t exactly a myth, you know.

That’s the mirror out to get you.

How else can I explain how I found myself in a world I didn’t know, in a time nobody had ever seen, in the middle of a war nobody had ever known? Stolen from friends I didn’t realize I never wanted to leave, and given to a world that had had only a passing glance from me in the hopes of giving myself a lifeline from the depths of my self-mutilation.

I didn’t remember My Little Pony too fondly, I’ll admit. I had to work, so hard, to remember any little detail of the show, and everything I knew, or thought I knew, anyway, was useless.

It didn’t matter much, in the end. My mirror wasn’t quite done with me yet.

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The thing about Equestria you need to realize is that magic is fucking everywhere.

I showed up, out of nowhere, and made a promise to their princess to win a war for her in exchange for help getting back to what I now realized was my home. My tank top was a filthy ruin, my fatigues all-but-trashed, my boots broken, and even my right arm acting up.

Less than a week after that, and I was scouting a location for a forward operating base on the border, roughly three hundred miles away, in a brand, spanking new set of fatigues, complete with sleeveless t-shirt and a jacket. And new boots. All thanks to magic.

My arm was still giving me trouble, though. I hadn’t had time to settle in properly and establish a workshop, so I was going to have to deal with the biofeedback electrocuting me for a little while longer. Though, I will admit, it was fucking irritating when my arm’s internal capacitors would discharge externally and make it look like I had spontaneously joined the Charade Brigade.

Stop. Right there. Before you ask me why I didn’t just ask Celestia for a workshop and some tools, and maybe a little magic help in repairing the damage, let me remind you of a couple of things. One, as awesome as a biomechanical prosthetic arm looks and sounds, it’s still a handicap. Two, I was a stranger in a strange land, and I was never going to be anywhere near as trusting as Michael Valentine (up your fuck~ing gee~eeek!). And three, I was in Equestria, the land of literal sunshine, smiles, rainbows, and friendship-is-magic-glee.

My arm represented everything wrong with the world I had come from. Violence, abuse, disdain of another living creature...that arm was nothing but bad mojo. And in a world full of empathetic creatures, nobody, especially sweet, innocent, cake-addicted Celestia, deserved to know that there was a litany of agony written across my body.

I don’t think I could take it if I made that nice mare cry. Even if she had trolled me into leaping my way to the front lines.

Right, so, there I am, scouting out a location near the base of the mountains. There were a couple of pathways heading up, no real roads to speak of, so it would doubtless make travel difficult for every pony but pegasi. There’s a reason the Swiss are only ever really invaded by accident.

Leading up to the mountains, though, were the myriad of reasons why I wanted this location secured as our FOB.

First, the gentle-rolling foothills established a great pre-made trench network that, with a little bit of earthworks, would make for good defense in the event of incursion. No, I was not planning to fail, I was hoping for the best, but planning for the worst. Too many generals have gone down in history for being fucking morons, I was not planning on Iron Hoof being one of them.

Oh, did I forget to mention that? I wasn’t leading our troops. Did you honestly expect me to? Yeah, sure, and my name’s Gary. No, I was technically a ‘foreign advisor attache’ to the current head of the Royal Guard, Captain Iron Hoof.

Ah, Iron Hoof. No-nonsense unicorn, slate-gray with a black mane and blue eyes. He kept himself trim and strong, he was nearly as large as I vaguely recall a certain Apple stallion from days long gone, and his mane. Oh, lord, the best thing about him was the multiple fucking military buns he kept his mane in. Like, remember Mulan? Yeah, his mane was kept in that style. His cutie mark was a side-on spartan helmet, with a couple of spears crossed behind it.

Sounds like a badass old warhorse, right? He was. He really, really was. Five minutes around him, and I already felt like I was back in Basic, hoping against hope this monster of a DI didn’t notice me. Of course, being the fucking alien I am in this world, that was never going to happen. Especially since I was going to be his XO in all-but-name.

I’ll let you in on a little secret, though? You put this hardass hoofbreaker anywhere near old Earth, and he will find Broadway. And he will own it. I shit you not, the quickest way to get on this stallion’s good side was to start singing a musical within earshot.

...I still remember Phantom of the Opera Day.

Right, so, where was I? Ah, right, rolling foothills, trench warfare, planning for incursion, more reasons I wanted this for our FOB. Right.

Reason number two was the relative nearness of this part of the border to no less than three pony ‘towns’ on our side. At least one or two were about as close to a town in a spaghetti western you could get and still have a viable population, but there were roads and a railway system close enough to the location to serve as a viable means of procuring supplies and rations.

You do not go to war on an empty fucking stomach. Just, full stop, no.

And finally, the third reason I wanted this location is because it was near the mountains, which had gems in them. I wanted those shiny little fuckers, and I wanted them bad.

Wait, back up, let me explain.

The day after I arrived, Celestia had gone off to do Princess-y things, no, I do not know or care what she did, what’s important is that she gave me free rein of the palace apart from bedrooms or personal chambers. And the city outside. Yes, it was a cage, but it was a big cage, and there was a library.

I’m a nerd, sue me. Like you’re not here with me. Pot, kettle, skull.

So, I went to the library, and started reading up on, what else, dragons. Interesting fact, did you all know that before Spike was hatched, Celestia had had his egg for centuries? Yeah, kept it in the library, in a glass case near where she kept what few books on dragons her library had.

….Okay, so I may have opened up his egg’s case, and cuddled him for a little bit and told him about how awesome he was going to be, shut up, you’d do the fucking same. I mean, it’s Spike’s egg. No way I wasn’t going to tell him he was going to be an awesome goddamned dragon. Yes, I am well aware that that statement is redundant. Dragons, therefore awesome, are awesome.

Right, so, I decided to kill some time by reading up on dragons. I wasn’t allowed anywhere, and I was still wearing my ruined-as-fuck CAF fatigues, so I decided to pass the time the only way I could. That was when I discovered that dragons eat gems.

Why is that fascinating, you might be thinking? It’s just a clever little bit of fun written for a kids’ show, a dangerous one, considering dragons equal awesome, and thus are prone to imitation by children, and eating gemstones is fucking stupid, but just a little cartoon detail, right?

Wrong.

I was in a real, living, breathing world, and dragons ate gemstones. This is important for a number of reasons. First, it implies that there is such a glut of gems in Equestria, or at least Equus as a whole, that they’re all-but-useless as coin-of-the-realm. They’re food. You only sell in bulk at Carbon Costco, if you catch my drift.

But second, and more importantly to me, is their properties. What makes them such good food, and fuel, for a fucking reptilian king of awesome?

That took some looking into, but after a couple of hours, I found that the gems in Equus have an entirely different structure compared to those of Earth and Cor. First off, they’re carbon and silicate, sure, that makes them incompressible and ridiculously hard, materially-speaking, just like our gemstones, here, but it’s the structure of the atomic lattice. It’s entirely different.

Our gemstones have atomic lattices in reinforced geometric shapes, usually triangular, tetrahedral, or octagonal bonds in a crystalline pattern. This makes them ridiculously strong, despite being made of what amounts to compressed ash.

Equus gems have random atomic lattices. Their bonds are weird. They don’t form predictable, repetitive chains. They form organic, grown random linkages. The gems are like organic life. They form, they grow, they mature, and they do so rapidly. This makes them structurally weaker, undeniably, but it also makes them...let’s say nicer on the gut.

They weren’t inimical to life on consumption because of these bonds. As a matter of fact, their atomic structure aside, the absolute most important part of Equ-Equusian...Equestrian gems is what happens when they’re being digested. You expose one of these gems to high-potency dissolution agents, like, say, hydrochloric acid, and their atomic lattice alters itself rapidly. It straightens out, starts taking on geometric form in tiny, atomic groupings, and opens itself to bonding in atomic chains.

It takes on traditional gemstone properties, more familiar tetrahedral ones, as it moves through the body and attaches itself to the body’s growth proteins, where it takes on even more metallic properties. It’s like calcium for dragons, and sure as fuck explains why the bastards are so strong.

But that’s not the important bit.

You don’t need to digest food in your stomach. Any acidic-enough compound is capable of breaking down foods into base properties. Fire does it, to an extent, as well.

Why, you ask, is this important? Simple.

Gemstones in Equestria were, in a very real way, Koprulan minerals.

Geek. Up.

Oh, for the love of Night...okay, in Starcraft, you build a base. You start off with a resource-gathering point, and ship your workers out to collect Vespene Gas and minerals. Both of which are native to the Koprulu Sector. The minerals are what I’m talking about.

When exposed to an SCV’s fusion cutter, or a probe’s plasma torch, they begin to realign the minerals’ chaotic structure into a more crystalline-metallic formation, which they refine further into neosteel plates, for Terran structures, or ...whatever Goauld-inspired bullcrap the Protoss use to make all their shit gaudy-ass-gold.

The Zerg, though? Their hive eats those minerals and makes what I now realize are basically baby dragons.

Fucking. Awesome.

So, why did I want gems? You do the math. I was an Engineer, in what was about to be a war, and I had recently discovered that the gems here were like fictional mineral deposits from one of my favorite games and stories ever. I had blueprints burning behind my eyes, connections forming in a tech-chain that was shortened immensely by the mere presence of these gemstones. I could make neosteel. I could build Terran technology.

You’re goddamned right I was going to build a goddamn Command Center.

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I still don’t like fire. Okay, fine, that’s putting it mildly. Fire still made me break out in a hive-inducing sweat. I fucking hate fire. Fire is mean and evil and painful and it hurts.

Why am I talking about my pyrophobia? Because that was literally the only way I had to talk to my new unit.

Once I was done scouting the location for our initial FOB, I headed back to camp. It wasn’t much, just a campfire, a pup-tent, and my camp gear, but I was used to less. Never built a campfire before.

Unfortunately, magic has rules. Always does. Sometimes the rules change based on what world you’re in, in my experience.

I already went over the rules of magic in Cor. In Equestria, magic is fucking weird. Multiple schools, from wild magic to nature magic to arcane magic, but they all have rules.

Unfortunately for me, in Equestria, the modern radio did not exist. Oh, broadcast radios existed, but for military applications, you couldn’t beat magic as a form of communication. Problem? I was not a unicorn.

Telepathy is a spell in Equestria, but it depends almost entirely on a school of magic that requires a Night-blasted horn. I am a cat. I have no horn.

Worse, the unicorn that would be in my unit, stallion by the name of Captain Iron Hoof, perhaps you know of him? Yeah, he was in the capital training his troops while I was scouting. It isn’t his fault he didn’t realize I wouldn’t be able to communicate, it was my suggestion to head out here after looking over the survey maps.

Fucking magic being fucking everywhere.

So, I had to send a scroll to Captain Iron Hoof in a way that simultaneously made me want to squee, and scream. Hence the campfire.

I’m not going to lie. At this point, I’ve been an engineer for roughly six years. I have worked in forges, I have sparked off gunpowder more times than I care to remember, and I have stuck bits of myself in fires by accident. My own, internal magic was literally made of fucking fire. I should be over this, right? Right.

Wrong.

In the forge, the fire is usually hidden inside of a kiln, if it’s not an electrical or plasma kiln. Sparking off gunpowder is a quick, sudden explosion that like as not requires prying me off of the goddamned ceiling, anyway. And I never volunteered to put bits of myself in fire, that was usually the Elves throwing fireballs and napalm spells at me.

I don’t like Elves, by the way.

As to my internal magic...I never used it when I had a choice. Right now, though, I did not have a choice.

I scrawled out a quick note about the results of my survey, studied it over, proofread it some more, made some minor edits, cleaned up the language a bit, made it more formal, scratched it all out, grabbed a new parchment, made myself a report-style form-letter, filled it out, copied it over, proofread it, double-checked how much parchment I had in my messenger bag, decided I didn’t have enough, and, with a sigh, stopped procrastinating.

Oh, shut up.

I closed my eyes and, for the first time in Equestria, called my magic out of my core. It crept along, quietly, slowly, before racing for the easiest channel through me and into the environment. Because of my accident, and the nature of my Ethereal Self, this manifested in a spiritual channel of mana through a limb that did not exist any longer. This meant that my right arm, my mechanical limb, had to be specially designed around my Ethereal Self, so that it could manifest my mana, as it was the path of least resistance.

The end result is that my right arm looked like it was covered in burning fire.

This was my mana’s purest expression. If I filled my entire aura up with my mana, I’d probably look like I was a super saiyan, what with the blond hair and the aura of furious fucking flames.

Anyway, my arm lit itself on fire. I could feel it, the heat dancing across my right side, licking out, eager to eat, to consume, to burn. Before I could start panicking, I opened my eyes and grabbed the scroll, weaving the spell Princess Celestia had taught me before teleporting me out here. The fire on my arm turned green, touched the scroll, and incinerated it, the ashes blowing towards the lonely mountain in the middle of the plains far, far to the southwest.

Then, I allowed myself to panic.

My arm was on fire. Again. My mana could not harm me, not in this expression of it. It was my own aura, suffusing myself in preparation for spell creation. It was me, my magical self, rising to the surface.

That did not stop my heart from believing it wanted me dead. I remembered every instant of those three burning days. The horror of agony that would not allow me rest. I could find no surcease of flame licking my wounded arm, taking more and more of my flesh and crisping it to ash.

I could smell the smouldering fur, all over again, slowly turning into the crisp, actinic smell of burning flesh, a cooking scent not unlike gamey chicken filling my nose. I could hear my own screams burning my ears, tearing my throat to bloody bits as my eyes filled with the orange, blue, white, and yellow of my own arm dissipating into crackling and popping energy.

I relived those three days in three minutes before my mind caught up to itself and relaxed its hold on my magic, letting it fall back into dormancy in my Ethereal Self.

It sucks. It really, really sucks to have magic, to be able to create fucking miracles out of nowhere, and be unable to use it without reminding yourself of the worst goddamned experience in your two lives. I still have days where sparking off a quick little spell freezes me up, deep inside. The fire is a part of me, it always has been, since I was a nine-year-old kitten.

Shut up. These are manly tears of shame, not anything sad or moomoo or whatever. Ass.

So, anyway, I sent off my evaluation of the site to the good Captain, and set about policing my camp. I was just getting everything situated into a ruck on my back when my surroundings lit up with a bright white luminescence and bam! Instant deja vu.

Apparently, the Princess had decided my report was either insufficient, or she needed me back home, for a given value of ‘home’, as I appeared once more in the throne room in a flash of light, a Princess in front of me, Iron Hoof on my left, and a couple of guardsponies behind me.

At least this time I was fucking conscious. Didn’t stop me from making my surprise known to one and all, though.

“Bucking Tartarus, lady, are you trying to give me a heart attack! I thought you wanted my help, not my corpse!”

Fuck it, man, she’s not my princess. My princess is a fiery-hot redhead with a zest for life and mischief. And punk rock. I respect Evelyn.

Celestia, at this point, was a fucking obstacle. Her and Iron Hoof, the bastard pony glaring at me with his laser-like blue eyes at my obvious disrespect of his beloved diarch.

Said diarch was, of course, seated upon her throne, gazing down at us with those magenta-violet-whatever eyes of hers half-lidded in sadness. If she was irritated with my…’informality’, she didn’t let it show as she replied, “I apologize for the untimely teleport, Sergeant Graves, but, given the circumstances, I thought it might be best to bring you back as swiftly as possible.”

With a shrug, I tugged my stetson off of my head with my right paw and curved my clawtips through my hair, spiking up my bangs again before resettling the only vanity I had ever indulged in back on my head. I looked up at the white mare and gave another shrug, releasing an explosive sigh as I shook my head. “Okay, look, you got something to say, say it. Like you said, time’s up, move fast, we need to get this manure spread.”

Seriously, even now, that was fucking irritating.

Anyway, Iron Hoof spoke up, at that point, giving me a royally-irritated sniff as he reached into his saddlebags with his magic and pulled out a bunch of maps and diagrams. He inclined his head towards the princess, who took them in her own magic and began to look over them. Me? I still have no idea what was on those pages, I was just an ‘attache’, not an actual enlisted soldier of hers. They looked like troop movements, but fuck if I know what the meat of them actually was.

“This is particularly worrisome, Captain. Are you certain that the pegasi saw this much movement?”

“I am, Your Highness. They may be unused to reporting events of this particular nature, but I trust their word, regardless. The Wonderbolts are some of our best weatherponies for a reason, my lady.”

Oh, right, that’s a thing. Pegasi control the weather in Equestria, save for a few places where wild magic is more powerful. Note I said ‘Equestria’, not Equus. Pegasi weather-services are typically unwelcome in other kingdoms. Bad enough Equestria controls the cycle of sun and moon, but to capture the weather, as well? You may as well hand your kingdom, empire, whatever over to the ponies. Your cultural distinctiveness will be added to their own. Resistance is futile, you have no chance to survive make your time.

Oh, so you got that one. Good for you. Describe a tribble for me. Hah!

Anyway, Celestia spent about a minute looking over those documents, then sighed and retreated into the Royal ‘We’ again. Honestly, at this point, I started to wonder if maybe Twilight Sparkle had been responsible for pulling this stick out.

“If this is accurate, Captain, then it would seem we have little more than four months before the griffons take Us to outright war. Given the reports Our economic advisors have given Us of the rate of withdrawal from Our trade agreements, and the number of airships leaving Equestria’s airspace, We fear We must hoof up our own preparations. Sergeant Graves?”

…..Airships? Griffons have airships? No, wait, hold the fucking phone, airships? …This becomes a thing I desperately need. I mean, come on! I want a squadron of airships. I want a whole bunch of them. I’ll name them ‘Agrius’, ‘Highwind’, and ‘Bahamut’, and I’ll crew them with red pegasi. Exclusively. Because Red Wings, bitch! Airships!

Are people talking to me? Oh, right, that’s a thing.

I immediately moved my eyes from studying Celestia’s cutie mark (shut up) and met her magenta eyes. Now that I wasn’t occupied with the whole world-hopping thing, and was, in fact, quite bored listening to two people talking around me, I noticed something I hadn’t the last time I spoke with Celestia.

Every time she looked me in the eyes, she flinched. Just a little, and it was only really noticeable in the wings, but her feathers would ruffle up just a bit, and her eyes got just a tiny bit sadder.

“Yes, Your Highness?”

The ruffling stopped, but the sadness remained, lacing her voice as she addressed me, “We must ask, Why have you not joined Captain Iron Hoof at the training academy to prepare Our ponies for this war?”

Ah. I should have figured this would come up.

“I apologize, Your Majesty, but to be honest, I could not effectively train your troops for many, many reasons. Primarily, though, the fact of the matter is, I’m bipedal, and your troops are quadrupedal. I have no idea how I would conduct a battle if I were to be turned into a pony, here and now, and I have no idea how to adapt my own kingdom’s tactical manual into a quadrupedal fighting force. My training would actively harm your troops, in that case.”

Captain Iron Hoof’s stern expression actually made me hold my muzzle shut to keep me from laughing uproariously, the way his jaw dropped and his hoof came up to literally ring his helmet.

“I never thought of that….”

So, that was why Iron Hoof spent an entire week looking like I got my jollies by kicking his in. Good to know he thought I was a lazy-ass, duty-derilicting procrastinator!

Have I mentioned that, regardless of my desires not to see Iron Hoof fail to conduct a war, I fucking hated his ass like I hated fire at this point in time? No? I hated that fucking pony like I hated fucking fire at this point in time.

“While that does make a great deal of sense, We are forced to wonder what you have been doing with your time, Sergeant Graves, and how it will assist Us in surviving and winning the war to come? Need We remind you that Our assistance in returning you to your home requires Ours to be in a fit state?”

Wow, PA, much, Celestia? I tipped my hat’s brow down over my eyes, mostly just so I could roll them in peace, as I replied, “Your Grace, Captain, I’ve been scouting locations around Equestria near the border so as to study up on the landscape and what tactics the griffons might be likely to attempt first, as well as scouting prime locations to start building a mobile command center.”

Iron Hoof picked up his jaw (no, literally, he used his hoof to shut his jaw) and turned towards me, that stern look right back in his eyes as he gruffly spoke, “You are wasting your time looking for places to build command tents, boy.” He looked back over to Celestia, snorting, “Honestly, Your Majesty, your troops will be ready faster and with less irritation if we don’t rely on this...outsider.”

Right. That one...yeah, okay, that one fucking stung.

“Tents, Captain? Who the Tartarus said anything about tents?”

Fucking goddamnit, I hate this. Even ‘hell’ was being scrubbed into something kids can say without pissing their parents off. Fucking Hasbro.

“What else could a ‘mobile command center’ be, ‘Sergeant’.”

I reached into my messenger bag (I was not calling it a saddlebag, damnit) and pulled out a metal dowel. It was irregular, and pocked in strange places, but it represent the fruits of my research into gems, so far. I mean, I didn’t exactly have a proper forge or anything set up, so getting a two foot long dowelish sort of configuration going was amazing. I tossed that over to Iron Hoof, who caught it in his slate-gray magic.

“Try to bend that, Cap.”

He did. He spent a good two minutes on it, pouring more and more magic into it, but all he got for it was the tiniest bend. I actually picked it up, right out of his magic, and tucked it back into my messenger bag. “That was neosteel. Very durable, very strong, and very, very light, if manufactured properly.”

The captain nodded slowly, looking confused. “...What does that have to do with the price of tea in Chineigh?”

...Chineigh? The fuck is...anyway.

“My ‘mobile command center’. I can build it out of that.”

The captain rolled his eyes and vocally-sneered, “Ooh, a tent made of metal. Will it require three shingles, or will two suffice?”

At that, I took my hat off and ran my flesh paw through my hair down to the base of my braid, ignoring the twitch of my right wrist. I didn’t bother to hide my eye-rolling.

“It won’t be a tent, you twit. It will be a mobile construction yard with living quarters, war room, and sensor net. The command center is practically an entire firebase on its own.”

Celestia cleared her throat and raised her eyeridges at me. “This does sound like quite the boon, especially with the properties of the metal you say you can build it with, Sergeant. However, it sounds like it shall be quite large, and regardless of lightness, it will be exceedingly heavy. We wonder how you make something like this...command center...mobile?”

Here, I grinned and put my hat back on. “Oh, that’s easy, Your Highness. It’ll fly."

I quite enjoyed the floored look on both of their faces

"Admittedly, detaching the docking clamps deactivates a great deal of the command center’s fringe benefits, mostly due to grounding issues, but hey.”

I spent a moment just soaking in their disbelief, and took out the blueprints and the relevant texts I knew I'd need from the library to show the math, and then spent the next two (boring) hours showing off my work, proving the concept, and outlining the resources I needed.

Have I mentioned I fucking hate bureaucracy?

Anyway, Appleoosa was about to get a bunch of train-loads of gemstones, setting me up for phase two of my grand plan to win a war against an enemy I had no intel on outside of fucking library books/

Still, it was mostly enjoyable, as I explained how a Terran Command Center actually worked. The looks on their faces throughout the whole discussion...just magnificent. I wondered, for a moment, how they’d react when I turned up wearing Raynor’s CMC-400 Powered Combat Suit.

….But that’s for later.

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Whenever I was in Canterlot (that’s the big city on the lonely mountain smack-dab in the center of Equestria, in case you were wondering), I had to keep myself to myself, outside of Royal summonses. I mean, for obvious reasons. A war was about to pick up, and there’s a strange non-pony that isn’t even a minotaur wandering around, carrying loads of weapons?

Yeah, either I’d get blamed for the war, or I’d freak the ponies out. Or both.

It made for some seriously boring times, though. I literally had to be waited on hand and...er...hoof and hoof? Wow, that one really doesn’t work, does it? I couldn’t even say that I can engage in hand-to-hand, anymore, what with my paws (and yes, they do have pawpads, see? I put padded leather in my faux-sleeve to emulate pawpads for my mechpaw.) and ponies...yeah, it’s just not cricket. Hoof and muzzle? Bah.

I had to call on servants for the castle, and I could only go out and about, even to the Royal Gardens, at night, when everyp-...when all the ponies were asleep.

No. No, I am not saying it. I am not fucking saying it. Shut up, no, I will not say it! Goddamnit, I am not saying ‘everypony’!

...

...

…..I will find you. And I will kill you.

Right, so, anyway. Because of all of this nonsense, I kinda got into the habit of either being out and about in the wilderness, doing my scouting, or being in the castle. It kinda migrated to the point that I was sleeping through a chunk of the day, waking up in the afternoon and doing my dailies, and heading out at night to try and ease the cabin fever.

“Discord, buddy, I think I’m going crazy.”

….I was very, very bad at easing the cabin fever.

“I mean, come on. I know she’s got legs for days, but seriously, I always thought I was a boob cat.”

….Really, really bad at it.

“And don’t get me started on that mane! In my first life, a girl with that thing would immediately be labelled ‘con-girl’ or ‘die-hard lesbian’. Which might be the case, I don’t judge. But damnit, dude, she’s a pony. I am bipedal. Why the hell do I find that...wait, the hell?! I can say ‘hell’?! What the fuck, man?! Fucking...oh, Light, I can swear. I can fucking swear! Discord, man, I could fucking kiss you!”

….Shut up, I had volumes.

So, okay. I was in the gardens talking to a statue. The statue. The statue of Discord. Which was currently wearing my stetson.

Like I said, I’d gotten into the habit of meandering around the gardens at night, when I didn’t have anything else to do. This was the night after I’d sold Celestia on my command center, and I was still waiting for the first shipment of gems to come in. Iron Hoof had grumbled his superior way off to whatever Royal Guard Training Academy was running his classes, and Celestia had meetings on top of meetings that afternoon, so I ran off and hid for a few hours until the moon was up.

Also, no, seriously, Luna had a fucking point way back when. Almost the minute Celestia lifted the moon, every single pony in Canterlot closed up shop and buried their muzzles in their pillows. I am almost certain I heard a great disturbance in the Fluff almost half an hour to the fucking minute after the moon came up.

I’d be pretty damn pissed off if my people literally could not wait to miss my greatest work and a labor of love.

Once I heard the Poofening of the Pillows, I ran out into the gardens. I wasn’t about to wake the Big Mare on Campus up to teleport me out to a campsite with no gems to work with, I still didn’t have a workshop available to fix my arm, and I was getting really, really fucking tired of staring at books or walls, so I ran my psycho little tail out into the gardens.

I may have pissed off a few budgies or whatever, but fuck it. Fluttershy wasn’t around, and right then, I didn’t give much of a fuck. I needed AIR!

And that’s when I found Discord’s statue. He looked exultant, happy, as he had been celebrating his nascent ‘victory’ when the Elements of Harmony sealed him up tighter than my old family’s wallets on my birthday.

No, I’m not bitter, why do you- fuck off.

At this point, I think I need to go a bit deeper into how my Voltan-gifted memory works. I love engineering. Absolutely adore it. Could do without the math that goes into it, as I hate routine, but eh. Take it where you can.

My memory is perfect. Absolutely, steel-trap perfect. At least, it is when I give a flying fuck about something. When I was in Corenna, I could literally have built my old Mirage from scratch. That car was my life for a long damn time. It stuck in my mind perfectly. Star Trek, Star Wars, a whole hell of a lot of fanfiction...I could remember every single line, every word, because those were pieces of me that were important. Blueprints on my old Toyota, even after a casual flip through the manual? Steel trap.

Other stuff? ….eh. By this point, I had forgotten almost the entire class of every single year I had spent in school back on Earth. I could name like, two people, mostly because I had dated them. Co-workers? Forgotten. I was even forgetting the later chunks of Supernatural, because, seriously, that show developed Run Fatigue in the worst way.

My Little Pony was new, and it had saved my life for all of a month before it finally failed and I decided to see if I could replace ‘oxygen’ on my list of physical necessities. It didn’t have enough time to really soak into my memory. I had bits and pieces, and almost all of them centered around Discord.

And that’s only because of Q. John de Lancie is a God.

More of it was trickling back. I identified it as something I cared about (because I was fucking in Light-benoosed Equestria) and my memory was clearing it up, dusting it off, and putting it on a shelf. This was actually a bit of a problem, because no mortal, no matter what, has an unlimited amount of ‘shelves’ in their mental storage.

I had to lose something to get MLP. It would later turn out that I could no longer remember my family’s birthdays and quite a few holidays from Earth.

Eh. I can’t remember much about it, but fuck Labor Day, anyway. ...That’s got something to do with reproduction, right? Fuck you don’t look at me like that bitch I will Night-damned gut you.

So, I remembered Discord. I had a vague notion, at this point, that he was aware inside of his prison. He knew things, as soon as he got out, he really shouldn’t have, being a thousand years displaced.

Either that, or he Q’d up a manual to get himself up to speed. Which I do not put past him.

But right now, at this point in time, I needed a friend. An actual friend. Not a pony. Not a queen-in-all-but-name looking down on me for being a warrior or a cat-furry. Not a prissy little wannabe that had ‘fought’ his way through the ranks of a peaceful little town’s peaceful little Royal Guard with a superiority complex as large as the sun.

I needed a friend, and I remembered that Discord did, too. Given that, at this point, I figured either he was in a hell of ‘I have no mouth and I must scream’, or he’d get the cliff’s notes later on, when he woke up, I might try and get a head start on Fluttershy’s later redemption of the blighter.

That, and, as we have already covered, sanity and I are, at times, best described as ‘ships passing in the night’.

“So, is it because the fucking Queen of Hearts ain’t here? Or is it because you are? Whatever, fuck it. Now that I’m aware that I can swear, holy hell, I can swear. I’m going to figure this out. Dude, this is awesome!”

...Okay, it took a little while for me to finish swearing the air blue.

I told him all about me. Everything. I told him my life story, both of them, what I could remember from Earth, anyway. I ate up like, three hours just talking about Star Trek and StarCraft. I ate up another couple of hours summarizing my life on Cor. I talked about Callie, I talked about Sasha, I talked about my arm.

“...I mean, what did I do wrong? Why did she just…do that to me? I gave her my heart and my soul, I was willing to do anything for her. I loved her, man, I really did, and she just goes and throws me away? Why the fuck is ‘X threw me away’ my life story?”

….I cried. I let it all out. I vented, I ranted. By the time the moon was hitting the horizon, signalling the end of Night and the resurgence of Day, I was wrung-out.

“...thanks for listening, Discord. I have to head out, now. Sun’s coming up, and Celestia doesn’t want me offending her delicate little people’s sensibilities. I’ll be back, though, man. Tell you all about the Koprulu Sector and the ongoing adventures of Jim Raynor and shit next time, alright?”

I clapped him on the back, looked around to make sure nobody was looking, and gave him a hug. He needed it, more than I ever did, if he really was aware in that stone prison of his. On top of that, I whispered, “Hey, Discord. Look me up when you break out of here, bud. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that nobody deserves to be alone. So, if I’m around when you’re out and about, look me up, alright, partner?”

I gave him another clap on the back, grabbed my hat, and walked off. If I had stuck around for just a few moments, back then, I’d have seen a single teardrop squeeze out from between a couple of stone eyelids.

...I might be fucking with you. I admit it. I might not, though. Do you know? No. No, you do not.

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It took a couple of days for the shipment to come in, mostly because of the other, extra bits I had included that weren’t actually in the blueprints for a Terran Command Center. I needed a refining forge, a kiln that could get the gems hot enough to begin the molecular rearrangement, and a bunch of tools to handle it. I needed an industrial press (I had to modify a few printing presses with hydraulics at first), I needed tobacco like nobody’s business, I needed etching acids...yeah.

With those, though, I began to work. Celestia had tried to force a bunch of work ponies on me, to make it go by faster (no way this was getting done in under a month, minimum) but had balked when I pointed out that it was not uncommon for command centers under construction to be subjected to acids so volatile that an explosion of them could strip flesh from bone and reduce a fully-grown and well-armored individual into a gooey skeleton in seconds.

No, I did not tell her that banelings were not, in fact, a thing, but what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt me. I didn’t lie, I just failed to tell her that said volatile acid was usually employed by my enemies trying to keep me from expanding my base.

...I fucking hate Zerg Rushes. Hate.

It took me two long, sleepless days just to get enough neosteel forged and refined to my standards to start laying the foundation. Once I got that done, I had to shift to using some of the gems and some sand to start making circuitboards. Fortunately, computers are, in fact, a thing in Equestria. They’re barebones as hell, despite whatever hoops Twilight Sparkle made hers jump through, but I managed to program the auto-builder in the Command Center’s foundation to help out. I just needed the gems.

Oh, right. Forgot to explain that bit. In StarCraft, when you build Terran, you build fast. Not as fast as Zerg builds, but a hell of a lot faster than Protoss builds. From a gameplay standpoint, it’s all about the balance, but in practical terms...terms I now had to live in...Terran has the best design philosophy ever.

When you build a structure in SC2, you get to see certain effects that impacted the lore of the game, which, in turn, impacted their real-world execution. The Protoss actually build their structures on their homeworld, and teleport them through their Warp Gate Psi-Matrix to locations where they are needed. Only two Protoss structures do not need the Psi-Matrix’s pylon network to be warped in, their Nexus and...well...Pylons. The Zerg use massive organic hives to terraform the ground into a purple-grayish goo called ‘Creep’, which simultaneously nourishes them and turns the ground into a soft sort of mishmash that turns matter into biomass, which they use to generate more creep and build more ‘buildings’.

In all seriousness, the Zerg could reduce an entire planet into a pulsating life-form that exists only to spawn more zerg and conquer more planets in a matter of weeks. It’s fucking terrifying to think about.

Terrans, on the other paw...ooooh, Terrans. They’re crazy. Like, literally, terrans are goddamned psychos. Their combat philosophy is ‘get into the combat theatre and build shit while shit is fucking with us’. No joke. Protoss are ready to warp in as soon as they have an energy field produced by a pylon or one of their motherships. Zerg burrow into the ground and eat a chunk of your planet before you realize you’re in the middle of a discount Tyranid colony. Terran? What you see is what you fight.

They’re hardasses, through and through.

Now, the thing to realize is, why the fuck would you drop into combat and start building something? That takes weeks, if not months, and that’s a lot of bullets, blades, and glaive-wurms to fend off, right?

Well, the Terrans designed their buildings to make the process easier. An SCV (Space Construction Vehicle) is already a force-multiplier, being able to lift about a half a ton or so at a time and still move. Their fusion cutters are, contrary to gameplay, holy fucking shit deadly weapons and awesome at welding, and the buildings themselves each possess an ‘auto-builder’, a framework built into the foundation that helps assemble the building in a pre-made pattern.

It makes for all the barracks and command centers and whatnot to be pretty ‘samey’, but fuck it if it’s not effective.

The problem I was running into was I needed to program and set up the auto-builder, which was taking more time than I had figured on, given Equestria’s little issue with a less-than-passing familiarity with modern technology.

Like, no. Have you ever tried making your own circuit boards? How about your own circuits? It’s difficult and time-consuming, and it took me six days to get enough prepared that I could program the damned autobuilder.

Once I had that done, it was all a matter of feeding gems into the refining press and feeding the raw neosteel into the foundation. And also lifting a lot of sheets of metal for the autobuilder to weld into place.

….Yeah, I probably should have built an SCV first.

Now, at the end of about a week and a half, I actually got the command center to a decent point, where I could start leaving large amounts of neosteel in the hopper and heading back to Canterlot for a nap or five so it could fiddle with the innards of the command center. I was a little leery of this, but Iron Hoof and Celestia had apparently traced out an alert ward-scheme on the area while I was a little busy fucking around with printing presses, so I felt fairly confident in continuing my visitations to Discord at night. During the day, when the auto-builder had time to spare before it needed my attention, I actually went about sourcing other raw materials I needed.

No, seriously. I needed graphene-based oil (which was conveniently the only oil the ponies had readily available, but they called it ‘rock oil’) which I could then refine as close as possible to fullerene as I could without the command center’s fabrication facilities.

Yeah, this command center? It was going to look nice, but it was going to work like crap. I needed to build this sucker just to build a better one, later on. At the rate I was cadging and adapting technology into Terran tech, I’d need at least seven or eight command center iterations just to get to baseline StarCraft.

And baseline StarCraft would be the first command center capable of fabricating SCVs. I was at least a year away from my precious, precious SCVs. And once I had one of those, I could build a supply depot and a barracks.

...I’ll explain later.

This was my pattern for about a month, by the way. One month out of the four Equestria had before the griffons finally got up off their duffs and felt confident enough to come screaming over the borders. One month that I had used to fabricate seven-eighths of the most powerful military structure Equestria would likely ever see. One month to get it built enough that most of its fabricators were online and usable, if only in their base states. One month to get what I really, really wanted out of my command center.

Security and familiarity? Pfft, no. I needed a construction bay.

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The thing you never see in RTS games is the inside of the buildings you construct. You see the outside, you see the units coming out of them. In the really good ones, you see the buildings have animations that trigger under certain conditions, like production or damage.

But you never see the inside.

The command center is impressive. Another thing that hits you in the teeth when adapting something like this to real life is scale. Like, no, seriously, the scale in StarCraft is fucking broken. On the map, the Minotaur-class Battlecruiser, the epitome of (playable) Terran engineering, is roughly ten times the size of your standard marine, whereas in cinematics, the fucker is damn-near city-sized. In actual fact, according to the blueprints in my head, the Minotaur-class is 1,103 meters long, 654 meters wide, and 258 meters tall.

The command center suffers similarly. Some depictions have them as large as football fields. Your map has them take up a space roughly twelve-marines large and three marines tall. The actual command center, though, that I was building?

...Yeah, I had to make that one a bit smaller. Three-quarters of its actual size, the one I was constructing was about 1200 square meters of space, forty meters long, and about thirty wide. Four stories tall, each story about three meters, so twelve meters of height. So...the football field thing's not exactly off-base, now, is it?

Yeah, I was grateful for that auto-builder.

Anyway, the interior that you don't get to see in the game? That shit was nice. The bottom floor was a foyer with two corridors leading around the sides, a massive hangar in the center for construction, ten ‘rooms’ for storage of raw materials and completed SCVS.. The three floors up were devoted to the more...warlike pursuits. In fact, the entire top two floors were the sensor net and computer and analysis sections. The second floor was...pretty much offices with a big war room in the center. I loved the war room. It had a massive table with a holographic map display connected to the sensor net.

So awesome.

Anyway, I wanted this command center for the first floor, and the first floor only. I needed fabrication facilities. It took some doing, but by the end of the month, I had managed to cobble together an auto-doc for a procedure I’d been putting off for a year back in Corenna.

My arm is a mess. You know it, I know it. I hadn’t replaced or repaired it for over a month, and even before then, I was due some serious maintenance on it back when I hugged Bakuda’s baby.

At the end of the month, I finally bit down on the bullet and decided to improve it. Especially since it would be neosteel. The problem is, neosteel does not mesh well with organics unless those organics are Zerg. Or dragons, but whatever. It doesn’t corrode. You need baneling acid to corrode this stuff, seriously. It’s atomically-sealed. It bonds very, very well with itself, and with vespene gas, and that’s about it. This wouldn’t be much of a problem, except it makes lubricating it ridiculous. You build something from neosteel, you lubricate it from the inside. And no, blood is a terrible mechanical lubricant.

My old arm, I was lubricating with WD-40 equivalent from the outside. Occasionally, I’d slick up the inside of my sleeve with the stuff and that’d keep me going for a week or two before I’d need to replace it. The neosteel? Nope. It seals up really nicely, so I’d have to use an internal lube. This is a problem, because an oil pump would have to be externalized from the arm, somehow, because of the compact space. I couldn’t just have little pockets where I put oil in, because then they wouldn’t reach the entirety of the arm. Basically, if I wanted my arm to work and look like an arm, I needed to put an oil pump somewhere.

My solution proves how insane I am. I built an artificial heart.

The neosteel arm took me a week to design, even with the help of the command center’s fabricators. I had to figure out how to make the heart connect to the lubrication network inside the arm, design the network to reach every joint and cable without making so much noise it made hiding the bastard pointless. I had to design the heart to be externally-sealed, but internally negotiable. I had to design connection ports that ran through my own body so I could replace the lubricant where and when possible without exposing it to my delicate innards, while also making it possible to remove the limb without also needing to replace the pump.

This is where I got really crazy. I programmed the auto-doc to perform three different surgeries. One, it had to open up the right side of my back and install my artificial heart in pieces through my ribcage. I did not want to wait to repair my arm, which I had discovered had developed a short up in the internal capacitors in the shoulder, which was constantly electrocuting me and spazzing the arm out, and I did not want to have to cut through my biosteel-reinforced skeleton. So, installing the heart in pieces. Once that was done, it had to connect several more hoses and lines through my shoulder and my upper arm, seal them, drain them, and clean them. Third, it had to connect the arm to my nervous system. This wasn’t too bad, but the new arm required a new mounting structure, which necessitated the creation of another two access ports. These ran from the pump-heart towards my back, and out to an access panel I was implanting in my skin. This would be bolted to my rib cage and my shoulder blade.

Coincidentally, this also meant I had to increase the weight of the plates I had reinforcing the other side of my ribcage by about a dozen and a half kilos. And yes, while they were good ‘emergency body armour’, their primary purpose was to offset the weight of my fucking metal arm so I didn’t develop scoliosis or something.

...You know, looking back, I think I might be a bit of a masochist.

That took up the entire third week of the month. The arm and pump were constructed, the auto-doc was programmed and triple-checked, and I had just filled the hoppers of the auto-builder to carry on for the final week of construction. I sent Celestia a letter (I was getting better at it. I only went into a fugue for ten minutes after I sparked it off, this time.) stating that I would be working with my command center to get ‘a really fiddly bit done, and done right’, and I should be up and about in about a week, I just needed to make sure nothing went wrong.

Yeah, I know. I taunted Murphy, and he kicked me in the jaws. And the balls.

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It took me a couple of hours after I sent the letter to Celestia to get ready for the surgery. Completely apart from psyching myself up to do my first surgery on my actual, physical body since I had constructed my first automail arm, I was also having to psych myself up to do my first solo surgery on myself.

I was seriously missing Agrias, at this point. Anyway, there were a load of checks the auto-doc’s computer had to run through, and I had to undress, disinfect, and anesthetize myself.

Fuck no, I am not letting a fucking machine hit me with anesthetic, are you nuts?!

Anyway, I was in my boxers, just about to lay down on my belly and let the auto-doc start when I remembered I had a major problem. I didn’t realize what it was, so I sat up, leaving the auto-doc in standby, and looked around, trying to figure out what I had forgotten.

I was stripped down to my skivvies, including the fur sleeve? Check. Auto-doc had run through diagnostics (three times)? Triple-check. The pieces of the artificial heart were tagged and ready for the auto-doc? Check. The new arm’s pieces were on stand-by for the auto-doc to install? Check. Anesthetic button and IV were set up and running into my left wrist? Blissfully sweet check.

I reached up and scratched at my muzzle with my right paw, and that’s when I remembered I had to remove the mechanical arm I had on before I could put myself through the surgery. Rolling my eyes, I disconnected the IV (left the needle in my wrist, though), and padded out into the main hangar to get my toolkit. I swayed my tail a little in the breeze brought on by the open SCV bay doors leading outside, picked up my toolkit from where I'd left it by the hoppers, and turned around before freezing solid where I stood.

The hangar bay doors were open. I had not opened them. I clenched the bare metal of my paw into a fist after letting my right paw pat down my bare thigh, looking for a weapon I knew was not there. I turned around to face the intruder, wondering, for a brief moment, if this was finally going to be the moment where I died.

You ever have one of those moments you swear feels cinematic and dramatic as hell? Yeah, this was one of those for me.

It was like a slow rotation. I spun on my heels, the empty construction cradles lit from a source behind me slowly, so slowly, spinning to make way for more well-lit walls laden with tool chests and power equipment, then the edge of one brightly-lit portal framing a large, horned equine with a flowing, waving mane. It took until that silhouette was centered in my view before I realized what, or rather who it was.

Celestia, backlit by the sun, carrying a wicker basket of something in her magic. Her horn was shining just enough to let me see the expression of shock, sorrow, and pain as she gazed upon the hideous, scarred, broken, incomplete body before her, a body I had refused to show her, or anyone. A collection of agony and misery I had kept hidden as best I could since Sasha had discovered it years ago.

She read it, every word of a litany of pain whose author had not stopped writing since I was a newborn kitten. Every scar, every injury, every burn that had taken my fur and replaced it with pinkened wrath was being seared onto her magenta irises. Every missing chunk of muscle was written into her eyes by a tireless author of misery, burned there as surely as they had been burned away from my body.

And then she saw where my arm ended, and machine began.

There is no fucking with you, this time. Celestia’s violet eyes welled up as she gazed at me. She looked upon my missing arm, looked into my slitted green eyes, and just as I saw that familiar flinch and ruffle, she turned and she ran.

….at least she hadn’t thrown up in my command center.

It hurt, though, you know? It hurt like ten different kinds of hell. Someone as peaceful, as beautiful, as motherly as Celestia, Princess of Equestria, Solar Diarch of the Two Royal Pony Sisters, had looked at me, and run away.

I felt hideous. I felt filthy. The old familiar disgust with myself rose up, filled me, and tore me in two, deep down in my soul. She hadn’t even said a word. I guess a broken, old soldier like me just isn’t good enough, right? I retreated into my surgery chamber after closing the bay doors again, and set about removing my arm.

It was habit that saved my life, right then. If I hadn’t taken my arm off to maintain it a hundred, no, a thousand times by then, I probably would have ripped it off and done myself some irreparable damage. As it is, the procedure was so rote that, before I even knew it, the arm was off, I was laying down on my belly, and trying very, very hard not to see the salty droplets hitting the floor beneath me through the hole in the headrest.

It was just one more piece of silvered glass hitting the floor and breaking. Just one more moment out of a million moments that had taken my heart and turned it to...well, not to stone. I kept trying to say I didn’t care, I kept trying not to care. It never worked.

I never was any good at hardening my heart. Never was good at being made of marble. I had two hearts, now. One was made of metal, rubber, and fiber, and one was made of glass. Pitted, cracked, and blackened glass that could no more resist a hammer than my metal arm could play the piano without me. My artificial heart, my oil pump, was more human, more normal than the one I had been born with.

The first incision was a blessing, because it distracted me. It carved my body open like the haunted look on Celestia's face had carved my soul. It tore my body apart like Callie had my spirit, like my best friend Henry had, like Aislygn and grandma had. It tore into me and let me lie to myself, that the tears were from physical pain, and not from the gaping, open wound I had had for a heart for two decades, by now.

I had scared off Celestia with just a glimpse of my body. I had hurt Celestia. My existence had hurt the sweetest, most wonderful, and subjectively most attractive pony in Equestria.

...I didn’t use the anesthetic. I didn’t deserve to.

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